Half an hour with a developer

On Thursday (5 May), I went to a Meetup for the Kx community in Singapore. I met people who were working with software. Some of them worked at financial institutions, others at software companies. I had the opportunity to talk to a developer, whom I shall call C.

C talked about his programming projects at college, code golf, and his experience of using the q language.

How I talked

During my conversation with C, sometimes I felt like a talk show host, in the sense that I had little to no expertise in the things that C cared about. So, to compensate for my lack of expertise, I tried a style of talking that I have seen in a video clip of a conversation between two people. The video clip is as follows:

To me, the video had seemed like a contrast of a positive example and a negative example of listening to people. I tried the positive example when I talked to C.

Did it work? Well, he seemed to respond enthusiastically. When I said things like ‘How cool is that?’ or ‘That’s amazing!’ he replied with ‘I know, right?’ or ‘Exactly!’ He was so excited.

But I quickly ran into a problem. I wanted to go to the restroom, but I wanted to avoid sounding like the person in the video (who goes ‘Pass me the butter!’) Still, I excused myself in the end.

Now what?

I will definitely try to talk in a similar manner again when I talk to another developer, if the setting is appropriate. I had seemed to be able to keep the conversation going.

Perhaps, for the purpose of professionalism, I would ask questions in the style of interviews, in future.

The writer was at a Meetup where the food and drinks were courtesy of the people from First Derivatives.